A Catalog of Benevolent ItemsDistills ten volumes, four dictionaries, and 1,800 years of knowledge into an authoritative introduction to the Ben cao gang mu. The Ben cao gang mu was the world's most comprehensive encyclopedia of natural history and medicine when it was published in China in 1593. In fifty two chapters, the physician Li Shizhen recorded two millennia of medical observations, interpreting the wide ranging uses of plants, animals, minerals, and artificial substances